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Harvard professor finds racial bias in Google searches

Boston Globe

Posted:
02/07/2013 12:01:00 AM MST

Updated:
02/07/2013 12:09:17 AM MST

BOSTON — Latanya Sweeney, a professor of government at Harvard University, is a law-abiding citizen. So she was startled when a colleague showed her what happened when he ran her name through a Google search: an advertisement on the results page headlined "Latanya Sweeney, Arrested?"

That little display triggered a research project in which Sweeney, a computer scientist and specialist in data privacy, concluded that Google searches of names more likely associated with black people often yielded advertisements for a criminal records search in that person's name.

Sweeney ran more than 2,100 names of real people through Google searches. She found that names that sounded black were 25 percent more likely to trigger ads for criminal records than names that sounded white. In all cases, she found the ads were from the same firm: Instant Checkmate, a provider of online background checks that did not respond to repeated phone calls and e-mails seeking comment. Google, meanwhile, denied that its AdWords business discriminates.